Unofficial news and tips about Google

August 27, 2007

Google Facebook App

Google made a lovely app for Facebook that lets you search the web and share the results with your friends. Your queries are automatically included in Facebook's mini-feed, so your web history can be shared with your friends. There's also a page that showcases popular results found by other Facebook users.

At the moment, Google only uses your web history to personalize search results. Maybe in the future you'll be able to share some parts of your logs with your friends (for example, your bookmarks) and obtain better search results by using information from the profiles of your contacts. Yahoo tried to do this with MyWeb 2.0, but failed.

With the release of MyWeb 2.0, Yahoo has added an extensive array of new features focused on community-based searching and sharing of information. "It basically enables people to tap into each other's personal web by searching their trust network of friends," said Eckart Walther, vice president, product management, Yahoo. (...)

Yahoo has also developed a new relevance algorithm called "MyRank" for MyWeb 2.0. "It's a new search engine that we wrote that can search across thousands of nodes and millions of pages in a trust network," said Walther. Unlike PageRank and other link analysis techniques used by general-purpose search engines, MyRank is designed to ferret out clues to relevance based on the pages you and your community have saved to MyWeb 2.0.

12 comments:

Alex -- wrong place and big cheek, but please help! My gmail account won't let me send messages. I can receive but when trying to send it says: You are currently using 2885 MB (100%) of your 2894 MB. -- can you tell me what to do? (have been using gmail sinmce early 2005 and keep all messages in and out -- so many thousand. But do not want to delete anything right now )

There are still a few kinks Facebook and the makers of Google are trying to iron out. We appreciate your patience as we try to fix these issues. Your problem has been logged - if it persists, please come back in a few days. Thanks!"